As Katō Shūichi, with his usual frankness, points out in an essay included in this collection: ‘The France-Japan ratio of influence is anything but symmetrical. That is to say, the impact that French writing and thinking has had on Japan is much greater than that of Japan on France’ (p. 62). Although Doug Slaymaker entitles the collection ‘Confluences’ (which, admittedly, sounds a lot better than ‘Influences’), eight of the ten essays deal almost exclusively with unidirectional influence from France. Actually, I think a better case could have been made for creative influence in the opposite direction, but I will reserve a brief comment on that until the end.

The first two essays, by Matt Matsuda and Jean-Philippe Mathy, make a brave attempt to puff up the occasional writings on or references to Japan of French critical theorists such as Barthes, Kojeve, and Lacan into some sort of serious body of work in cross-cultural interpretation. I find this less than convincing and, anyway, would not regard it as a genuine case of Japanese ‘influence’. Rather than learn anything from the present and actual Japan, the French theorists generally used their own cliché images of the country, culled from a century of Orientalist stereotyping, to lend a kind of illusory substance to their fanciful theories. This was a literary tradition that began with Pierre Loti, and should not be confused with japonisme, which remains the one great example of a widespread Japanese cultural influence in France, and was confined mainly to the visual arts, with perhaps the one exception of a haiku influence on French poetry. The crucial difference is between a positive creative use of foreign artistic practices, as in not only japonisme but in many of the Japanese borrowings from French literature documented in this book, and a narrow-minded tendency to exoticize, dehumanize, or negatively stereotype the foreigners themselves – a tendency unfortunately not uncommon in either France or Japan. Japonisme differed radically from Orientalism of this latter type; the French artists involved made an honest and even humble attempt to learn from their Japanese models (for instance, by making painstaking copies of ukiyo-e). Matt Matsuda's attempt to associate the critical theorists’ views with japonisme is thus, in my view, fundamentally mistaken.